It lay naked beside him and covered his head with its soft black mantle. And it murmured sweet words of resignation into his ear and, with its warm fingers, it pushed away all questions and obligations as vain. And it whispered: ‘In solitude everything is permitted.’

Only at the moment when he was carried away did he awaken for a second and clutch desperately at a single thought: ‘This isn’t me! ... isn’t me! ... It won’t be me again until tomorrow! ... Tomorrow ...’

 

On Tuesday evening the first pupils returned. Another batch was due to arrive later, on the night trains. There was constant hubbub in the building.

Törless was surly and jaded as he welcomed his friends; he had not forgotten. And then, too, they brought with them something so fresh and worldly from outside. It shamed him, since he had come to like the oppressive stuffiness of the narrow rooms.

He was often ashamed in general. Not just about what he had allowed himself to be seduced into - not such a rare thing in boarding-schools - but because he could now not help feeling a kind of tenderness for Basini, while at the same time feeling with greater urgency than ever how despised and humiliated the boy was.

He often had secret trysts with him. He led him to all the hiding places that he had learned about from Beineberg, and since Törless was not skilled at that kind of surreptitious creeping, Basini was soon able to find his way better than he could, and became his guide.

But at night a kind of jealousy, when he looked at Beineberg and Reiting, would not leave him in peace.

But they held back from Basini. Perhaps they were already bored with him. At any rate, a change seemed to have taken place within them. Beineberg was sinister and remote; when he spoke, it was to give mysterious hints of something to come. Reiting seemed to have turned his attention to other things; with his familiar skilfulness he wove the webs of various intrigues, trying to win over some boys by performing little favours for them, and frightening others by using furtive ploys to learn their secrets.

When they were all three together, Beineberg and Reiting insisted that it would soon be time to order Basini back to the storeroom or up to the attic.

Törless came up with all kinds of excuses to defer that moment, but his secret sympathy was a constant source of pain to him.

A few weeks previously he could not have imagined being in such a state, because he had inherited from his parents a powerful, healthy and natural constitution.

But it should not be imagined that Basini aroused any real desire in Törless, however fleeting and confused. Something like passion, certainly, had been roused in him, but love was certainly only an arbitrary, approximate name for it, and Basini the human being was no more than a substitute, a provisional object for that desire. For if Törless was debasing himself with Basini, his desire was never satisfied, but was growing beyond Basini and turning into a new, unspecific hunger.

 

At first he had been blinded only by the nakedness of the slender boy’s body.

He had had the sense of being confronted with the forms of a very young girl, simply beautiful and far removed from anything sexual. It had been overwhelming, astonishing. And the purity that involuntarily emerged from that state had been that new and wonderfully uneasy feeling in his relationship towards Basini. But everything else had little to do with it. That surfeit of desire had existed for a long time - with Božena and long before that. It was the secret, unspecific, melancholy sensuality, free of any human object, of the maturing boy, which is like the damp, black, seed-bearing earth in the spring and like dark, subterranean waters that need only an arbitrary cause to rise and break their walls.

Törless’s experiences had become that cause. A surprise, a misunderstanding, confused impressions, had smashed open the secret hiding places where everything furtive, forbidden, overheated, uncertain and lonely in Törless’s soul had accumulated, and channelled those dark impulses towards Basini. Because there, all of a sudden, they encountered something which was warm, which breathed, which was fragrant, which was flesh, something that gave those indistinct and wandering dreams a form and part of its own beauty, in place of the corrosive ugliness with which Božena had tortured them in his loneliness. All at once a door to life was opened up for them, and everything mingled in the resulting half-light, desires and reality, orgiastic fantasies and impressions that still bore the warm traces of life, sensations that broke in from without and flames that flickered towards them from within, shrouding them beyond recognition.

For Törless himself, though, none of this could be distinguished any longer, and everything came together in a single, indistinct, unstructured feeling which he might, in his initial surprise, have taken for love.

 

But soon he learned to give a more accurate account of what had happened. From that point his unease drove him restlessly around. Hardly had he touched an object than he put it back down again. He could not hold a conversation with his classmates without falling silent for no reason, or distractedly changing the subject several times. Sometimes, in the middle of speaking, he would be overwhelmed by a wave of shame, and would blush, stammer and turn away ...

He avoided Basini by day.